The letter that Shawn Fahey believed she had received from her attorney — the letter explaining the terms of their financial arrangement, disclosing the conflicts of interest, documenting the collateral that secured the quarter-million-dollar loan she had given him — was, according to a computer forensics expert hired by the New Hampshire Professional Conduct Committee, a fabrication. The dates were wrong. The metadata was fake. The document had been created not in 2018, when Fahey handed over her money, but much later — after the ethics investigation had already begun, after the questions had already been asked, after the walls had already started to close in.

By the time James Berriman, the forensic expert, delivered his findings, there was no computer left to examine. Justin P. Nadeau, the Portsmouth attorney who had been entrusted with Fahey's legal affairs — a woman who had suffered a traumatic brain injury after a drunk driver struck her vehicle — had destroyed it.

On April 1, 2026, a Rockingham County Superior Court jury found Nadeau guilty on four felony counts: theft by deception, financial exploitation of an impaired adult, forgery, and falsifying physical evidence. He is scheduled to be sentenced on June 22. The conviction represents the criminal coda to a disciplinary saga that had already stripped Nadeau of his law license two years earlier, when the New Hampshire Supreme Court concluded that his conduct amounted to "a deliberate, multi-year effort to deceive the disciplinary authority."

"It's difficult for me to imagine something worse for a lawyer to do," one member of the Professional Conduct Committee said during the proceedings, according to court records. The statement, which appears in the Supreme Court's disbarment opinion, was not hyperbole. It was a clinical assessment of a case that involved an attorney exploiting a cognitively impaired client, concealing the exploitation through an elaborate scheme of document fabrication, and then destroying evidence when the scheme began to unravel.

The Accident and the Attorney

Shawn Fahey's story begins, as so many stories in the personal injury world do, with a car accident. Fahey, a resident of Exeter, New Hampshire, was struck by an intoxicated driver. The collision left her with a traumatic brain injury — the kind of injury that does not heal cleanly, that reshapes a person's cognitive landscape in ways that are often invisible to casual observers but devastating to the person living inside it. Traumatic brain injuries can impair judgment, erode impulse control, compromise the ability to evaluate risk, and make their victims uniquely susceptible to manipulation by people they trust.

Fahey hired Justin Nadeau to handle her legal affairs. It is not clear from the public record precisely when the attorney-client relationship began, but by 2018, Nadeau occupied a position of extraordinary influence over a woman whose capacity to protect her own interests had been fundamentally compromised. What he did with that influence would become one of the most disturbing attorney misconduct cases in New Hampshire's modern legal history.

In August 2018, over a five-day period between August 17 and August 22, Nadeau convinced Fahey to give him a $275,000 loan. The loan was secured, Nadeau told her, by a condominium. What Nadeau did not tell her — what the jury found he deliberately concealed — was that the condominium was encumbered by a lien, an adverse claim, or some other legal impediment that made it worthless as collateral. The property that was supposed to guarantee the return of Fahey's money was, in effect, a phantom asset.

Nadeau also told Fahey he was "strapped for cash" — that the money was a temporary bridge until the proceeds from a pending defamation lawsuit against the Portsmouth Police Department came through. The defamation suit itself had an unusual backstory: it arose after police investigated whether Nadeau was laundering money for a man named Christian Jennings, who had been arrested in Portsmouth with quantities of marijuana, Ecstasy, amphetamines, a loaded firearm, and $42,000 in cash. According to police, Nadeau had been handling an $85,000 marina investment for Jennings before the arrest, though the marina deal never closed. Nadeau sued the police for defamation when they opened their investigation. The case was settled in 2019.

Four months after the first loan, in December 2018, Nadeau went back to the well. He obtained a second loan from Fahey — again under what the attorney general's office described as false pretenses. The total financial exposure: nearly $300,000, extracted from a woman whose brain injury made her, in the language of the criminal statute, an "impaired adult."

The Hidden Referral Fees

The loans were not the only money at issue. According to the investigation conducted by the New Hampshire Attorney Discipline Office, Nadeau had referred Fahey to a Massachusetts attorney to handle her personal injury case — the case arising from the very accident that had caused her brain injury. That referral generated $165,000 in fees, which Nadeau collected from the Massachusetts attorney. He did not disclose these payments to Fahey.

The referral fee arrangement raises its own set of ethical questions. Under Rule 1.5(e) of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, a division of fees between lawyers who are not in the same firm is permissible only if the division is in proportion to the services performed by each lawyer or each lawyer assumes joint responsibility for the representation, the client agrees to the arrangement in writing, and the total fee is reasonable. An attorney who collects $165,000 in referral fees from a case involving his own cognitively impaired client — and who does not disclose the arrangement to that client — has violated not just the letter of the rule but its animating purpose: the protection of clients from being treated as commodities by the lawyers they trust.

The Cover-Up

What distinguishes the Nadeau case from the ordinary run of attorney theft cases — and what elevates it from the merely criminal to the genuinely shocking — is the cover-up. When the New Hampshire Attorney Discipline Office's Professional Conduct Committee began investigating Nadeau's conduct, he did not cooperate. He did not come clean. He did not retain counsel and negotiate a resolution. He embarked on what the New Hampshire Supreme Court would later describe as a "deliberate, multi-year effort to deceive the disciplinary authority."

The effort began with delay. Nadeau slow-walked the production of documents that the PCC had requested, stalling for months while the committee waited for records that should have been readily available in any competently managed law practice. Delay is a common tactic in disciplinary proceedings — respondent attorneys who know that the evidence will be damaging often hope that institutional patience will run out before the documents arrive. In this case, the delay served a more specific purpose: it bought Nadeau time to construct his defense.

That defense was built on fabricated documents. When Nadeau finally produced records related to the Fahey matter, he presented printed copies of a letter that he claimed he had sent to Fahey at the time of the loan transactions — a letter that purportedly contained the conflict-of-interest disclosures and other communications required by the Rules of Professional Conduct. The letter, if genuine, would have undermined the PCC's case by suggesting that Nadeau had made the required disclosures and that Fahey had entered into the financial arrangements with full knowledge of the terms.

The letter was not genuine.

The PCC retained James Berriman, a computer forensics expert, to examine the electronic records on Nadeau's office server. Berriman's analysis was devastating. The metadata on the documents Nadeau had produced — the digital fingerprints that record when a file was created, modified, and saved — showed that the documents had been created well after Nadeau took the money from Fahey. The dates on the letters were fake. The documents were backdated fabrications, designed to create a paper trail that had never existed.

"The Berriman Report and the spoliation of evidence, in my mind . . . is one of the most significant violations I have seen in decades of practice before the ADO before joining this committee," one PCC member observed during oral argument, a statement later quoted in the New Hampshire Supreme Court's opinion.

But Nadeau was not finished. Before the hearing at which this evidence would be presented, he destroyed his computer — the device that would have contained the original electronic records, the unaltered metadata, the digital evidence that could have been subjected to further forensic analysis. The destruction of evidence in the face of a pending investigation is, in the legal system's taxonomy of misconduct, among the most serious acts an attorney can commit. It demonstrates not merely consciousness of guilt but an active willingness to obstruct the very process designed to protect the public from attorneys like him.

And then there was the promissory note. According to the New Hampshire Department of Justice, Nadeau forged his then-wife's signature on a backdated promissory note — yet another fabricated document added to the growing pile of fraudulent paper that constituted his defense. The forgery charge on which the jury convicted him arose from this act.

The Disbarment

In April 2024, the New Hampshire Supreme Court disbarred Nadeau. The decision, rendered under Supreme Court Rule 37A, came after the Professional Conduct Committee's investigation, the Berriman forensic report, the document fabrication findings, and the computer destruction. Nadeau argued that disbarment was too harsh a penalty. The court disagreed.

The Supreme Court's opinion found that Nadeau had engaged in a "deliberate, multi-year effort to deceive the disciplinary authority" — language that, in the context of attorney discipline, functions as both a factual finding and a moral judgment. The court concluded that the nature and extent of Nadeau's misconduct, including the ethics complaints arising from the Fahey case, made disbarment the appropriate sanction. There was no dissent.

Nadeau's appeal of the disbarment was unsuccessful. The Supreme Court found that he had "crossed too many lines to be allowed to continue as a lawyer" — a characterization that, while colloquial for a high court, accurately captures the cumulative weight of the evidence against him.

The Criminal Case

Three months after the disbarment, in July 2024, New Hampshire Attorney General John M. Formella's office arrested Nadeau on criminal charges. The arrest was based on information that had emerged during the PCC investigation — the same investigation that Nadeau had spent years trying to obstruct. In September 2024, a Rockingham County grand jury returned a fifteen-count indictment.

The criminal charges were, in some respects, redundant with the disciplinary findings — both proceedings addressed the same underlying conduct. But criminal prosecution serves a fundamentally different purpose than attorney discipline. Discipline protects the public by removing unfit attorneys from the profession. Criminal prosecution holds individuals accountable for conduct that the state has determined to be not merely unethical but illegal. The distinction matters: disbarment costs a person their livelihood, but a felony conviction can cost them their liberty.

The trial proceeded before a jury in Rockingham County Superior Court. On April 1, 2026, the jury returned guilty verdicts on all four consolidated counts. Senior Assistant Attorneys General Alexander J. Kellermann and R. Christopher Knowles prosecuted the case, with investigative support from Investigator Daniel Mederos and assistance from Sara Greene of the Attorney Discipline Office.

Nadeau's attorney, Kalie Lydon, declined comment following the verdict. Sentencing is scheduled for June 22, 2026, at 9:00 a.m. The charges carry the possibility of state prison time, though the specific sentencing range will depend on the court's assessment of the facts and any applicable sentencing guidelines.

The Political Backstory

Justin Nadeau was not just a Portsmouth lawyer. In 2004, he ran for the Democratic nomination for New Hampshire's 1st Congressional District — a bid for one of the state's two seats in the United States House of Representatives. The campaign was unsuccessful, but it placed Nadeau in the public eye in a way that made his subsequent downfall more visible and more newsworthy than the typical attorney discipline case.

New Hampshire is a small state. Its legal community is smaller. A disbarred attorney is news; a disbarred attorney who once ran for Congress is a story that resonates beyond the legal profession and into the broader public consciousness. The political dimension of Nadeau's biography does not change the legal analysis of his conduct, but it does amplify the public interest in seeing that conduct addressed — and it adds a layer of irony to the narrative of a man who sought the public trust through the democratic process and then betrayed the professional trust that the legal system had already placed in him.

There is a further family dimension that the court records reveal. Nadeau's father, J.P. Nadeau, agreed to resign from the New Hampshire Bar Association in 2009 after he was investigated for a conflict of interest arising from his representation of a construction company involved in a dispute with his own son. The elder Nadeau's departure from the profession was quieter and less dramatic than his son's, but the proximity of the two cases — father and son, both investigated for professional misconduct, both removed from the practice of law in the same small state — is difficult to overlook.

The Portsmouth Police Connection

The defamation lawsuit against the Portsmouth Police Department, which Nadeau cited as the basis for his cash-flow problems when soliciting the loans from Fahey, deserves closer examination. The lawsuit arose after police investigated whether Nadeau was involved in money laundering on behalf of Christian Jennings — a man who, at the time of his arrest, was found in possession of illegal drugs, a loaded firearm, and a substantial amount of cash.

According to police, Nadeau had been handling an $85,000 marina investment on Jennings's behalf before the arrest, though the marina deal never materialized. When police opened an investigation into whether the funds represented drug proceeds and whether Nadeau's involvement constituted money laundering, Nadeau responded not by cooperating with the investigation but by suing the police department for defamation.

The defamation case was settled in 2019 — on what terms the public record does not reveal. But the case provides important context for understanding Nadeau's relationship with Fahey and the loans she provided. Nadeau told Fahey he was "strapped for cash" pending the resolution of the police lawsuit. He used the anticipated settlement proceeds as part of the collateral package for the loans. In other words, the very lawsuit that arose from a police investigation into Nadeau's financial dealings became the instrument through which he extracted money from a cognitively impaired client.

The circularity is striking. An attorney is investigated for potential involvement in financial wrongdoing. He sues the investigators. He uses the pending lawsuit as leverage to borrow money from a vulnerable client. He fails to disclose material information about the collateral securing the loans. He conceals referral fees he collects from the client's own injury case. And when the disciplinary system catches up with him, he fabricates documents, destroys evidence, and forges signatures to cover his tracks.

The Vulnerability of Impaired Clients

At the center of this case is a person — Shawn Fahey — whose vulnerability was not incidental to the misconduct but essential to it. Traumatic brain injuries affect an estimated 1.5 million Americans each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Of those, many suffer lasting cognitive impairments that affect their ability to manage their finances, evaluate the trustworthiness of advisors, and protect themselves from exploitation.

When a person with a traumatic brain injury hires an attorney, the attorney assumes a fiduciary obligation that is, if anything, more demanding than the obligation owed to a fully competent client. Rule 1.14 of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct addresses the responsibilities of lawyers whose clients have diminished capacity, directing the attorney to "as far as reasonably possible, maintain a conventional relationship with the client" while also permitting — and in some cases requiring — the attorney to take protective action when the client's capacity is impaired.

What Rule 1.14 does not contemplate, because it should not need to, is the possibility that the attorney will exploit the client's diminished capacity for personal financial gain. The rule assumes a baseline of good faith — an assumption that, in Nadeau's case, was catastrophically misplaced.

The criminal charge of "financial exploitation of an impaired adult" — a statute designed to protect vulnerable populations from predatory conduct by people in positions of trust — captures the essence of what Nadeau did to Fahey. He was not merely her attorney. He was, by virtue of her injury and his professional role, one of the people on whom she depended most. He used that dependence to take her money.

The Discipline System's Slow Turn

The timeline of the Nadeau case raises uncomfortable questions about the speed of the disciplinary system's response. The loans were obtained in 2018. The PCC investigation uncovered the fabricated documents and destroyed computer. The disbarment did not come until April 2024 — six years after the initial misconduct. The criminal arrest followed in July 2024. The indictment came in September 2024. The trial did not conclude until April 2026 — nearly eight years after Nadeau first extracted money from Shawn Fahey.

Eight years is a long time. It is long enough for a client's financial situation to deteriorate irreversibly. It is long enough for evidence to be lost, memories to fade, and witnesses to become unavailable. It is long enough for the person responsible for the harm to continue enjoying the proceeds of his misconduct while the system grinds slowly toward accountability.

The delay in the Nadeau case is attributable in part to Nadeau's own obstructive conduct — the document stalling, the computer destruction, the fabricated evidence that had to be forensically analyzed. An attorney who is determined to delay disciplinary proceedings can often succeed in doing so, at least for a time, by withholding documents, raising procedural objections, and generally treating the investigative process as an adversarial proceeding rather than a regulatory inquiry.

But the system's structural slowness cannot be attributed entirely to the respondent. Disciplinary proceedings in New Hampshire, as in most states, move at a pace that reflects both the deliberative nature of quasi-judicial proceedings and the resource constraints under which bar disciplinary offices operate. The Attorney Discipline Office is not a prosecutor's office with unlimited subpoena power and a staff of investigators. It is a regulatory body that depends, to a significant extent, on the voluntary cooperation of the attorneys it oversees. When that cooperation is not forthcoming — as it manifestly was not in Nadeau's case — the process slows to a crawl.

The Sentencing and What Comes Next

When Nadeau appears for sentencing on June 22, 2026, the court will face the question that every sentencing judge confronts in cases of professional betrayal: what punishment is proportionate to the harm inflicted, the trust violated, and the obstruction perpetrated?

The felony convictions carry the possibility of state prison time under New Hampshire law. Theft by deception, when the amount exceeds $1,500, is a Class A felony in New Hampshire, punishable by up to fifteen years in state prison. Financial exploitation of an impaired adult is also a felony. Forgery and falsifying physical evidence carry their own sentencing ranges. The cumulative exposure is significant.

Whether the court will impose a custodial sentence or opt for some combination of probation, restitution, and community service remains to be seen. Sentencing in white-collar cases involving attorneys is notoriously variable, influenced by factors ranging from the defendant's age and health to the availability of assets for restitution to the court's assessment of the defendant's likelihood of reoffending. In Nadeau's case, the fact that he has already been disbarred — and therefore cannot reoffend in his capacity as an attorney — may weigh against a lengthy prison sentence. But the severity of the conduct, the vulnerability of the victim, and the elaborate nature of the cover-up may weigh in the other direction.

The question of restitution is particularly important for Fahey. A criminal conviction entitles the victim to seek restitution as part of the sentencing process — a mechanism that, while often insufficient to make victims whole, at least creates a legal obligation backed by the enforcement power of the criminal justice system. Whether Nadeau has assets sufficient to satisfy a restitution order is unknown from the public record.

What the Profession Owes Shawn Fahey

The legal profession's claim to self-governance rests on a bargain with the public: in exchange for the privilege of regulating its own members, the profession promises to identify and remove those who betray the trust that clients place in their attorneys. In the Nadeau case, the profession fulfilled that promise — eventually. The PCC investigated. The forensic expert was retained. The fabricated documents were identified. The disbarment was ordered. The criminal referral was made.

But the bargain also requires that the profession confront the conditions that make cases like Nadeau's possible. Clients with diminished capacity are among the most vulnerable people in the legal system. They cannot always recognize when they are being exploited. They cannot always evaluate whether the advice they are receiving serves their interests or their attorney's. They depend, more than any other category of client, on the good faith of the professionals who represent them.

When that good faith is absent — when an attorney looks at a client with a traumatic brain injury and sees not a person to be protected but a source of funds to be extracted — the harm goes beyond the individual case. It erodes the public's confidence that the legal profession can be trusted with the vulnerable, the confused, and the impaired. It damages the reputation of the thousands of personal injury attorneys who handle brain injury cases with competence and integrity every day. And it raises the question that every bar association must answer when a case like this comes to light: could we have caught this sooner?

In Nadeau's case, the honest answer is probably yes. The loans were made in 2018. The referral fees were collected around the same time. If the client had possessed the cognitive capacity to recognize what was happening and to file a timely complaint, the investigation might have begun years earlier. But that is precisely the point: clients with traumatic brain injuries often cannot recognize exploitation, and the disciplinary system cannot wait for them to do so. The system must develop mechanisms — mandatory trust account audits, enhanced supervision of attorneys who represent impaired clients, mandatory reporting by co-counsel and opposing counsel who suspect exploitation — that detect misconduct before the victim is able to report it.

Justin P. Nadeau will be sentenced on June 22, 2026. Whatever sentence the court imposes, it will not undo what was done to Shawn Fahey. It will not restore the money that was taken or the trust that was betrayed. But it will confirm, in the starkest terms the legal system can offer, that the exploitation of a cognitively impaired client by a licensed attorney is not merely a professional failing to be addressed by a regulatory body. It is a crime — and it will be treated as one.

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Sources and Citations

• New Hampshire Department of Justice. (Apr. 1, 2026). Former Attorney Justin Nadeau Found Guilty of Multiple Felony Charges. doj.nh.gov
• State of New Hampshire v. Justin P. Nadeau, Rockingham County Superior Court (verdict Apr. 1, 2026; sentencing June 22, 2026)
• New Hampshire Supreme Court, In re Justin P. Nadeau, Case No. LD-2022-0009 (disbarment order, Apr. 2024). courts.nh.gov
• New Hampshire Public Radio. (Apr. 2, 2026). "Ex-Lawyer Justin Nadeau Convicted of Theft from Impaired Client." nhpr.org
• Portsmouth Patch. (Apr. 2, 2026). "Disbarred Portsmouth Attorney Found Guilty of Stealing from Impaired Client." patch.com
• InDepthNH. (Jul. 31, 2024). "Seacoast Lawyer Charged with Fraud." indepthnh.org
• ABA Journal. (Apr. 2, 2026). "Disbarred Lawyer Convicted of Stealing $275K from Impaired Client." abajournal.com
• New Hampshire Union Leader. (Apr. 1, 2026). "Disbarred Lawyer Found Guilty of Bilking $275K." unionleader.com
• ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct, Rules 1.5(e), 1.14, 8.4